Retro/Grade: How to Play a Reverse Shooter
Greetings, PlayStation.Blog readers! We recently announced that Retro/Grade, the first game played entirely in reverse, would be releasing exclusively on PSN on August 21st. Understanding and developing a game that is played in reverse is tough, so I want talk about how it all works. Firstly, how did we design a game played in reverse? We worked backwards of course! We started with the idea that it’d be cool to play a game where time is flowing backwards, but we didn’t have any ideas on how to pull that off. We did a lot of brainstorming — time reversing is a hard concept to wrap your head around. We figured for gameplay purposes, undoing your actions would be the best fit for that theme. When undoing, you have to match both the timing and the position of previous actions. When matching timing, music is the best way to achieve that, so we thought rhythm gameplay would be the best mechanic to build the game around. We figured a 2D game where your motion is constrained to a few discrete lanes would make it easier to match the positions.
